Five Month Update

Dear Lana,

Writing your five month update has given me a little trouble, not because I don’t know what to say, but because there is so very much to say. You are growing up faster than I ever believed possible and every day is filled with new adventures and revelations. To organize my thoughts, I jotted down a quick list of things that I need to cover this month. Here’s how it turned out:

1. Sleeping (well!)
2. Eating (bored w/breastmilk)
3. Sitting Up (trying so hard!)
4. Shrieking (very frequent, very loud)
5. Being Completely and Ridiculously Adorable (see accompanying photos)

It’s a long list, so let me jump right in. On the sleeping front, we moved you out of the bassinet in our bedroom and into the crib in your room this month. I feared that this might be a difficult transition, but in the end your father just swaddled you, rocked you to sleep, and laid you down in your crib. You slept peacefully through the night, so the next evening John had the audacity to swaddle you and lay you down in the crib while you were still awake. You calmly conversed with your mobile for about ten minutes before growing quiet. I walked into your room and was stunned to find you sound asleep. I held my breath and waited for you to throw open your eyes and yell, “Gotcha!”, but you continued sleeping like an angel and have done so every night since.

When it comes to eating, you have grown so very weary of bottles and so very ready to sink your teeth into a cookie, piece of pizza, or whatever else your father and I may be eating. Unfortunately for you, you have no teeth to sink into anything and will have to be content with bottles and baby cereal for a little while longer. We will also have to abandon our practice of holding you while eating our meals, since it’s starting to feel more like a mugging than like dinner.

While I’m on the topic of things that frustrate you, let’s talk about sitting up. You are making valiant attempts to sit up every day now, but you refuse to use anything other than the sheer strength of your abs to pull you up. I will admit that you have some seriously strong abs – you can probably out-crunch seasoned professionals like that annoying woman from my Abs of Steel workout video – but I think that you may need to enlist some help from other body parts like, let’s say arms, in order to make it all the way up. Since you like to lie with your legs up in the air, I tried to show you once how to drop them down and use the forward momentum to roll up to a sitting position. Something about the rolling motion made you unleash a horrendous series of stinky farts, so I won’t be repeating that exercise again. Perhaps your father will practice with you, especially if I forget to warn him about the farting.

Finally, I can’t complete a recap of this month without mentioning the screaming. You have discovered a talent and love for screaming, and will frequently do it out of the blue to get attention or just crack yourself up. If I’m paying attention, I can actually see you ramp up to a big shriek. You’ll take a deep breath, clench your fists, and open your eyes wide just before unleashing a loud scream. My favorite part is the way you react to your own screams – the way you appear surprised, amused, and then incredibly proud of the noise you just made. After a big scream you often look up at me with a big, gummy smile and wait for me to scream back. We’ve had some very long screamersations, but you always have to have the last scream and will grow hoarse if I don’t throw in the towel first. I’m afraid this doesn’t bode well for your teenage years, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Thanks for another amazing month, my beautiful baby girl.

Love,
Mom

Taste Testing

The last couple of weeks have been busy ones for Lana. She hit several developmental milestones in a very short period, including rolling over consistently, passing items between her hands, reaching for things she wants, and noticing her feet. And by noticing her feet, I mean grabbing her feet and stuffing them into her mouth.

To be honest, pretty much everything within Lana’s reach now ends up in her mouth. She takes particular pleasure in noshing on magazines and catalogs. One might even call her a catalog connoisseur. She finds that Victoria’s Secret and Pottery Barn have a nice flavor, but when she’s feeling really indulgent nothing satisfies like Red Envelope.

Watching Lana gnaw on feet and magazines made me think it might be time to start feeding her solids, so I consulted my books and favorite baby sites for information on introducing solid foods. One of the articles I read listed “shows interest in adult food” as a good sign that your baby is ready to start on solids. What Lana does is more along the lines of, “lunges at adult food and attempts to wrench it from said adult’s hands”, so I figured the time was right.

With her doctor’s blessing, we introduced Lana to a small bowl of rice cereal mixed with breast milk. She took a few hesitant bites and let the cereal dribble down her face, enjoying the sensation of something other than breast milk or paper goods. The surprise only lasted for a minute, though. As I moved in with the fourth bite, she coolly grabbed the spoon from my hand and stuffed it into her mouth. The look on her face said, “I’m a baby, not an idiot, Mom. Spoon in mouth, spoon in bowl, spoon in mouth. Now give me something hard to do.”

Welcome to the SEC, beyotch

Lana has spent countless hours watching football with her dad. She’s become a real fan of the game, so much so that she actually squealed with delight when the BCS National Championship Game came on last night. John explained to her the importance of this particular game, and how for one night only we would root for the Florida Gators to win so the SEC could get a little respect. After Ohio State returned the first kickoff for a touchdown, I explained to her that Nathan, the nice man and Gator fanatic who came to visit her a few weeks ago, might very well be passed out in the stands.

Needless to say, we were all very pleased with the outcome of the game (sorry Kelly and Dave). About the only thing I saw from Ohio State that impressed me was their band, who really rocked out the spelling of Ohio on the field. I'm used to more subdued halftime performances by the Georgia band. The most halftime excitement I can recall from my days as a student is when one impossibly loud fan yelled, “Our nerds are better than your nerds!” as the Georgia marching band followed Auburn’s band onto the field. The student section got a good laugh out of that, partially because it was funny and mostly because the majority of the student section was drunk, drunk, drunk.

All of which brings me to my cousin’s husband, Mike. I heard last night that he is upset to have not yet made it into my blog. This is a good segue for doing so, because Mike is a band nerd (not a drunk). He's a nice guy, a good father, and a total band nerd. I can call Mike a band nerd because he’s family, because he's made a good living from music, because it’s something I can say that will make him regret complaining about not being in my blog without jeopardizing his future political career, and because I was also a band nerd. In fact, I actually lacked the musical talent to make it as a band nerd so I stood in the back of the field waving a flag around. That’s where the girls who couldn’t play an instrument, throw a baton, or dance like a skank (and I mean you, cheerleaders and drill team) went. To the back of the field, waving a flag that announces, “I surrender, I’m a dork.”
So Mike, you’ve been featured in the blog now. Careful what you wish for.